Please, please, please, make sure that it uses a context-free grammar. For the live of Knuth, correct that one stupid mistake he made and allow other people to parse your syntax. Good things will follow!
Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
151–160 of 217 posts
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#152Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…
It would be interesting to see if Nota could solve one problem that TeX and LaTeX, while theoretically capable, don't really solve in practice. Namely, the ease of styling according to dumb external requirements. Just to give you several examples:
* Very tight, but very loaded layouts like A0 conference posters
* Apply a national standard, such as, for example, post-Soviet GOST documentation styling standards
* All combinatorial explosion of bibliography styling requirements in different international traditions
* Make the documents look like a default style in so and so MS Word version
* Precise positioning of one picture upon another, or text upon a picture for quickfixes in the papers
* Be able to consciously tweak any of the above
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#153> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…
>I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. Yeah. To author's surprise, Adobe's PDF spec supports JavaScript execution[1]. And interactive 3D graphics [2][3]. Not to mention, audio and video [4]. And "Liquid Mode" for responsive-layout PDF documents [5]. Of course, these "features" were considered bugs by the ISO PDF/A spec (arch…
The static issue also permeates to webpages and other formats though. Although this is now just yet another competing method for documentation or creation, the restrictions caused by using TeX or LaTeX over more dynamic approaches are not insignificant.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#154Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…
Curiously, all these problems, and more, have been reasonably solved in Org Mode. Sadly, too few people know about it because too few people use Emacs.
You can write doctorate level academic papers in Org Mode?
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha, I was totally thinking about the watch blog too! I think that one is rather a special case. You could print it out with the first still of each bit and probably get out 90% of the content/context, and modify document to print out a few stills from each interactive part and get the same intellectual content. In it's case, the interactivity is superfluous, it's there to spark joy. It's really an example of a docume…
I strongly disagree with the idea that the interactive elements are only there to "spark joy" - in both of the cases you mentioned, the interactive elements are pretty fundamental. Their purpose is to let you get somewhat hands-on with the concepts the text is discussing - to allow you to take apart the watch yourself, at your own pace, and understand what all the pieces are doing. I'm sure you can convey the same in…
I'm not saying they're only to spark joy, but to me at least, their contribution is mostly in that category. I didn't really find it central to the content in any of the examples.
To my point it's "the last thing I want in a document", I stand by it. What I mean is I should be able to print it and really lose nothing central to the content. Yes, digital offers features which may enrich the experience/use/navigation, but at the same time there's questions of accessibility and ease of parsing. If I _have_ to interact with things to get the information//content out, it's effectively a web app, and not a document, and if done wrong it actively interferes with my ability to absorb the information. IMO the brighter ideas page firmly falls under that last point.
The watch page is wonderful, and the visuals and interactivity is done masterfully, in such a way it's obtrusive and not _required_ to understand the document.
I'd classify the elevator page as a web app, but there's really nothing keeping it from being a document/children's book.
And I just really, really, did not like the brighter ideas page. I think the content is good, but the execution got in the way instead of adding to the experience.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just my two cents - Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience. Sure if performance is a real issue then rust makes more sense than JS but I’m not sure that’s going to be hugely meaningful in most use cases. I’ve never been a fan of Latex despite writing some mammoth documents over the years. Latex always felt like a beast for academics not for business. Yet there’s o…
Surprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests
The standard for legal docs is to redline changes with an additional tool, because you don't necessarily trust the other contributors. They have decent tools for this, and the system works ok I suppose. Editing tends to be in tic-toc fashion anyways so I guess it works. You could do someting like this with git and a markup language, but I don't know you'd convince many lawyers that the squeeze was worth the juice.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Style and substance separation is easy and should be a requirement. Legal is pure text "programming" and what I mean is that the style of the text has zero bearing on the judicial process. The benefits of working at the proper level of abstraction compound. It enables tech like diffs and git, which then nicely solves a bunch of other problems as well. Using Word completely side-steps all those benefits. Sure, you get…
Of course this isn't and hasn't been true for quite some time. I'm the first to blast MS Word for being a total disaster (esp. templates, ie. style/substance separation, are bad) but it is no longer a locked-in platform. Even the docx format is only a zipped XML file. If you want, you can unpack the document file and put it into git. Thank you Open Document Foundation! On top of that, all contemporary word processors…
This 100%. It does get interesting when you get into non-plaintext things that have to somehow integrate into plaintext systems (git managed codebases). We've kind of left it up to CMS systems to handle the non-plaintext bits but this leads to many more orthogonal process problems.
IMO, I think it really comes down to finding a universal mechanism for diffing and 3-way merging things that aren't plain text (document diffing). I think distributed version control can be universal (at least on a data level), how an application renders a meaningful diff for a specific task is incredibly subjective to the document type and task at hand. My point being that I completely agree that plaintext makes a whole lot of sense for programmers and pretty much nobody else. However, distributed version control does not have to be confined to plaintext, it's just tricky to see when all the version control systems we're familiar with are plaintext ones.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#158Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…
Can I make a simple point? As an academic, 99% of my time is spent doing two things: 1. Writing statistical computations using a language like R or python. 2. Writing English text. The most important thing about a document language is that it should prioritize those things. For example, here's why Rmarkdown/Quarto is better than TeX. A TeX document starts: \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \u…
You are comparing apples and oranges, at least a bit. The latex equivalent is
\documentclass{article}
\title{Natural selection in the Health and Retirement Study}
\author{XXX}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\begin{abstract}
I investigate natural selection on polygenic scores
in the contemporary US, using the Health and Retirement
Study. Results
partially support the economic theory of fertility as
an explanation for natural selection: among both white
and black respondents,
scores which correlate negatively (positively) with education are
selected for (against). Selection coefficients are
larger among low-income
and unmarried parents, but not among younger parents or those with less
education. I also estimate effect sizes corrected for noise in the
polygenic scores.
\end{abstract}
...
\end{document}
I think I get your point, but in practice that part doesn't really get in the way, and if you are doing the same thing over and over (e.g. for the same publication) it's just a template anyway.
I don't love Tex/Latex, but most of the other markdown comparisons that emphasize "it's simpler" are because they can't do as much. Which is fine until you need some of that capability.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#159If it did not compile to JS (needing a browser to display? or at least a JS engine?) and did not depend on NPM and NodeJS, it would have a higher chance of being adopted into my workflows. I am also still wondering, what it does, that I would need in a blog or even academic paper, that I could not express using reStructuredText or the Org format. Especially reStructuredText is quite powerful, and even more so, when you add custom directives to it. I built a rudimentary wiki on top of that, with hypertext linking between pages, table of content and so on. Custom directives could be used for citations maybe.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curiously, all these problems, and more, have been reasonably solved in Org Mode. Sadly, too few people know about it because too few people use Emacs.
You can write doctorate level academic papers in Org Mode?
Yes, and you can use Pandoc to export to different formats, including Epub, HTML, Docx, etc. You can embed LaTeX and customize in multiple ways using Lua filters for Pandoc. I've found Pandoc to be more powerful than Emacs when it comes to writing documents in Org mode, while Emacs is more powerful when you use Org mode to do literate programming. YMMV